How leaders can build trust in the workplace

How high is trust in your organization? This is the first question I ask when I conduct a culture assessment at the companies I serve. Trust is an essential element and foundation for all relationships and business. Unless leaders build trust, they cannot build anything successful in the long term, and any kind of organizational change will be a serious challenge.

Organizational scholars define trust as your willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of others because you believe they have good intentions and will treat you well. In other words, you allow others to have power over you because you believe they will not harm you, but because you believe they will help and support you. If you have a high level of trust in your relationships with your colleagues, it corresponds to trusting the company that employs you and you can be sure that they will not deceive you or take advantage of your relationship with them.

But how does this work? How do we trust? To trust someone, especially someone new to us – someone we haven’t had a chance to build trust with yet – our brains build a model of what that person is likely to do and why. And there’s a lot going on beneath the surface. We use both mindfulness and empathy in every collaboration, meaning both parties in an interaction are constantly evaluating, “Can I trust you? How much do you trust me?” Some of us are naturally more trusting, naturally seeking positive intent, and putting ourselves before others. But in my experience, trust is earned. That’s why it’s so important for us as leaders to build trust with our people. It’s not wise to blindly trust someone until you’ve vetted them to see if they can actually be trusted.

Trust and safety need to be nurtured

The level of trust in an organization depends on the extent to which psychological safety exists. Do people feel safe to give their honest opinions? Do they trust that the criticisms leveled at them are fair and that their responses will be heard? Teams with high levels of trust have been found to be more creative and make decisions faster. They are high-performing teams because they are willing to admit mistakes, point out problems and challenges, and ask for help. If two teams are equally smart, why is a team with high trust more productive than a team with low trust? Because they iterate faster. They learn faster. Why? Because they trust each other and are honest about their findings in real time. A foundation of safety allows team members to quickly understand and develop their findings, collaborate smoothly, and co-create in the flow.

In the workplace, trust depends heavily on leadership because leaders model the behavior others follow. When leaders lead with fear and control, trust and safety are undermined in the long run. A boss who berates, threatens, or punishes you affects your performance and ability to speak your mind because you are focused on self-protection. This leads to a sense of “learned helplessness” as employees avoid their boss or do the bare minimum to be as invisible as possible. And this kind of leadership behavior hurts people to the point of causing trauma.

Neuroscience research proves it: Humans experience social rejection and social pain in the brain’s pain matrix longer than they experience physical pain. We are wired to connect and belong. When we lack the trust and safety essential to belonging, we feel our very survival is threatened, which perpetuates our suffering. To turn this around, we can consciously and proactively work to create a greater sense of belonging using conscious leadership techniques in the workplace and in society. Belonging is about belonging to yourself and connecting to a purpose bigger than yourself.

Practice the real thing

Being authentic is one of the quickest ways to create psychological safety in the workplace.

Psychological safety is the feeling that you can openly share your feelings, beliefs, and experiences with others at work without fear of reprimand, loss of status, or punishment. A joint Google and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study on psychological safety found that it is one of the most important ingredients in creating successful teams and ultimately high-performing, innovative organizations. This insight is the result of nearly 30 years of research by Amy Edmondson. Psychological safety supports appropriate risk-taking, speaking up, creativity, and most importantly, trust. When working with teams and senior leaders, start by assessing the psychological safety of the individual leader, the team, and the culture.

Before leaders can have the courage to build trust in their interactions with others, they must have the courage to understand themselves and what is important to them. Try this exercise that focuses on deepening this understanding.

Mindful Practices for Developing Inner Trust

Find a quiet place, if possible, and get out your journal. Take a minute or two to take a deep breath and get in touch with your center. Then think back to a recent experience with a partner, friend, family member, or colleague where you wanted to be authentic but couldn’t. Stop at the peak of that interaction and ask yourself these questions:

What are you afraid will happen if you tell this person your thoughts and feelings right now? How would you feel if you didn’t? What would you most like to tell this person right now if you weren’t afraid? How can you be more open and vulnerable?

Build trust with your team at work

As leaders and managers, it’s important to model how to be authentic in the workplace. Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, Inc., and I discussed the process of hiring with a focus on resilience and cultivating a resilient culture by leading with authenticity. First and foremost, Josh is clear in his communications about what he values ​​most: Eat Just’s mission is to increase consumption of plant-based foods and reduce animal cruelty and deforestation. Josh realized that the more confident he was in his mission and in himself, the more he was able to be vulnerable and humble when he made mistakes.

He now realizes that when he first started Eat Just, he came off as more confident and arrogant than he actually was because he wanted to appear more confident than he actually was. But as he’s progressed in his leadership journey, he’s learned that there are things he’s good at and things he’s not good at, and he recognizes and accepts that. This allows him to be his authentic self without feeling the need to overcompensate.

Josh shared with me something he often says when interviewing new employees: “This is our company. This is our mission. If there’s either a 100% chance that we’ll get acquired by an investor or a 20% chance that we’ll stay in the ring and get closer to accomplishing our mission, I’m going to take the 20% chance.”

“Josh has a similar approach to investors: ask yourself if you’re willing to take a bold step into the unknown and stay focused on the mission for the long term. By telling your truth up front, you can weed out the people who aren’t the best fit for your culture.

Josh also asks job candidates questions designed to assess their resilience because he has found that the best fit for his company is inherently resilient. Josh provides a great example of how leaders can build trust by cultivating strong inner integrity and communicating that truth and confidence in themselves as leaders.

Leading from integrity sometimes means leading from vulnerability. According to Brene Brown, vulnerability comes with uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. As leaders, we have the opportunity to create the conditions that support naming the fear that arises from vulnerability. Naming the fear allows us to move through it with courage, further promoting self-confidence, teamwork, and connection.